December 2011 Volume 7 Issue 4
Spring Edition
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Title
A Business Word List for Prospective EFL Business Postgraduates

Author
Wenhua Hsu
I-Shou University, Taiwan

Biodata
Wenhua Hsu is currently teaching at I-Shou University in Taiwan. She holds a PhD in the field of ESP from the University of Essex, UK and an MBA from Kansas State University, USA. Her interests include frequent sub-technical and lay-technical vocabulary as well as lexical bundles in a specialized field.

Abstract
This paper describes the attempt to create a business word list (BWL), which was compiled from a corpus containing 7.62 million tokens of 2,200 business research articles (RAs) across twenty business subject areas by examining the range and frequency of words outside the most frequent 3,000 word families along the British National Corpus word frequency scale. The operational measures involved the lexical coverage of BWL in the business RA corpus through software called RANGE. To reach 95% lexical coverage for reasonable comprehension of academic texts, 426 of the most frequently occurring word families in the corpus were ultimately chosen, and these accounted for 5.66% of the tokens in business RAs under study. In terms of greater lexical coverage, this restricted, more specialized word list may provide a better return on learning as opposed to the general vocabulary beyond the top 3,000-word level. For business students who plan to pursue further studies in their fields, the present BWL provides a window to the specialized content areas in academic research. EBP teachers can raise their students’ awareness of the commonly-used words reported in this study by incorporating corpus-based concordance data into teaching materials, thereby enriching non-English majoring students’ language experience with the use and patterns of the frequent lexical items in the business register.

Keywords: lexical coverage, business word lists, vocabulary levels, British National Corpus (BNC)